Making money online is not as difficult as some people may think, but making a substantial ongoing income online is actually pretty difficult. This is especially true if you are just starting out and aren’t sure what the best way to get started is. Keep in mind that most methods for making an online income will take a bit of time and/or money to gain traction. Also, you should be aware that there really are no quick and easy shortcuts to making money on the internet. It may take anywhere from a few months to a year before you begin to see substantial results.

While there are a number of different ways to make money online including article marketing, social media marketing, PPC (Pay per Click), etc, there are two main ways that I recommend to get started making money online:

1. Make Money With Affiliate Marketing: This means choosing the best affiliate programs or offers with high conversion rates. This would include joining the affiliate programs of popular sites like eBay, Amazon, Clickbank and Google Adsense.

2. Make Money With PTC (Paid To Click) Sites: A PTC site is a website that pays its members for the ads they click and view, on a daily basis. Popular and trusted PTC sites include ADFLY, LINKBUCKS, Neobux, Clixsense and GetBuxToday.

I have written a fairly comprehensive guide to earning money with PTC Sites and you can download it for free here.

Getting Started

With either of these methods there are only three things that you need to get started making money: A domain name, a web hosting account and an auto responder.

Domain Name

To get started the first thing that I would recommend is to register a domain name. I personally use NameCheap. I would suggest using a registrar that is separate from your hosting company. The reason that I recommend keeping your hosting and domain registrar separate is so that you can switch to a new hosting company easily if you ever find a better deal on a hosting package.

Web Hosting

Next, you will want to go to Hostgator and get a basic web hosting account. You will want to get a plan that will allow you to have an unlimited number of domains, and this should cost you around $5.00 per month. I use WordPress as the content management system for all of my sites, and if you purchase your hosting account through Hostgator, it’s really easy to set up. Just go to the “Fantastico” link on your control panel and create a new WordPress install

If you are working on a really tight budget, you can get started by using a site like Weebly to create a website for free. As soon as you can afford it however I would recommend paying the few extra dollars each month for hosting and you can have full control of your site with no banners or ads.

Autoresponders

What exactly is an autoresponder?  Basically, it is a program that enables you to automatically send emails to people (your leads). Now an autoresponder will not compose emails for you and it doesn’t involve spam or sending unsolicited email. What it will do is allow you to set up a sequence of pre-written emails that are sent out to the prospects in your database at regular, frequent intervals.

The importance of having a reliable autoresponder cannot be underestimated. As you go along in your internet marketing career, you will hear all of the internet marketing gurus tell you that the money is in the list. There is a good reason for this. Online marketing specialists know this to be a fact: The more prospects (leads) that you have on your mailing list that are interested in your products or services, the more sales you will make.